[GTALUG] Recommendations for useful laptop suitable for Ubuntu

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 01:42:34PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 11:06:51AM -0400, Alex Beamish via talk wrote:
> > It worked fine at the June meeting of the Perlmongers, sharing a Google
> > Hangouts session. The next day, it wouldn't boot -- couldn't even get it to
> > POST.
> 
> Hard to say.  My wife did have her T430 stop turning on a few years ago.
> My solution was to buy another T430 on kijiji and swap parts to make it
> work again (hers has a better screen and ram, the other had a working
> motherboard, hers had working speakers, the other didn't, hers had
> backlit keyboard, the other didn't).  Getting parts for a 3+ year old
> thinkpad T series is simple due to how many off lease machines are on
> the market.
> 
> > I plan to buy the appropriate HD -> USB gadget to recover a few files; I
> > assume there's little I can do to repair it.
> 
> Should work great.
> 
> > [] Decent speed -- I did some Audacity editing on my laptop when my
> > workstation died, and my goodness was that slow.
> > [] Decent wifi -- the HP Pavillion's Wifi receiver was pretty temperamental.
> > [] Decent battery -- no complaints about the HP, it would last two hours+
> > on a charge. That's enough for me.
> > [] HDMI output -- I can get by on just the laptop screen, but I do like to
> > have the ability to have multiple screens.
> > [] Reasonable size -- I think the HP Pavillion had a 14" screen, and that
> > fit into my knapsack nicely. I don't need a gigantic screen.
> 
> Well speed depends on the CPU and RAM.
> 
> I have never had wifi issues on a thinkpad, but I have only ever got
> one with the highest intel wifi option.  Never the cheaper thinkpad wifi
> (I think they were atheros based) option.
> 
> Battery life seems to have gotten better and better with each generation.
> Some cleaim 10 or 15 hours now, while 5 years ago 2 or 3 hours was
> more likely.
> 
> For HDMI, in the case of thinkpads, everything up to and including the
> Tx60 has mini displayport and needs a passive adapter to get HDMI.
> Tx70 and higher has HDMI ports.  I believe the Tx70 also has a USB-C
> thunderbolt port which provides the same abilities as the mini display
> port did in terms of supporting various types of video output.

This actually might be a really good deal:

https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/perkopolisca/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-series/ThinkPad-T570/p/20JWS0CA00

Brand new T570 (apparently they still have a few left of the older model),
8GB ram, 256GB SSD, Core i5-6300U, 15.6" 1920x1080 screen (I can't find
if that is IPS or not).  In fact they have a lot of decent sales on
different models right now if your budget was willing to move to $900
to $1000.  But then you are talking new with warranty, not used.

I would avoid the s variants (they are the slim models, which makes them
harder to fix, harder to upgrade, and usually more expensive in general).
But T470, T480, T570, and T580 are all nice.  The new x90/x95 models are
probably too new to have decent prices.

-- 
Len Sorensen